I'm not sure I was glad to walk home last night with old Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young songs stuck on loop in my mind, but the reason was Beth Gill--specifically, a solo performance she gave at Dixon Place in a Brink series program curated by Michael Helland and shared with soloist Isabel Lewis.
In Resurrected Dance Dance III, Gill played the scratchy vinyl on an old turntable set up on a chair, both items silhouetted in front of DP's wall by the solo's initial illumination--a single nightlight. What got me was the way she calmly slowed, grounded and rested herself inside the lilting, tilting, sometimes driving force of voices and guitars; how, when she chose to step, she stepped like a quiet, watchful heron on the hunt. A compelling performer, Gill can pull and hold viewers' focus by drawing us out of the forward strain of ordinary time and into a place deep stillness and concentration. DP is the place for doing a lot (or a meaningful little) with simple, ordinary things, and Gill can be a kitchen magician.
Lewis's Untitled Solo (Sweet Exorcist) contains poetic, powerful imagery and energy. Like Gill's solo, it plays with the effect of light on body and objects and harkens back to the '60s and early '70s in its selection of recordings with songs by The Great Society with Grace Slick, Curtis Mayfield (the source of the "untitle") and the Ethiopian ensemble Alemayheu Eshete/Alem Girma Band.
I've no idea what either artist intended here, but each of their solos conclude in an unsettling way. Gill--who has re-dressed herself in a black hoodie and slacks--replaces the last CSN&Y anthem with a fingernails-on-chalkboard number from Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band. As the Ethiopian tune unfolds, Lewis begins to drape her body in lengths of golden fabric and does not stop until she has wrapped her head and face too and tied the gleaming cloth fast around her neck. Her glamorous, sinuous wriggles do nothing to lessen the chilling effect of this image.
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